War & Media Talk Tonight

One of the world’s greatest journalists is speaking tonight in Portland for free. Philip Knightley was an investigative journalist in England during the 1950s and 60s before becoming one of the main western correspondents inside the Soviet Union. Knightley’s personal website describes him in somewhat lofty tones as a “distinguished journalist” but that’s okay because he’s written 10 very serious books:

I called Knightley last week at his home in Notting Hill Gate (“very posh” says Matt) to talk about media coverage of the Iraq War, the problem with embedding journalists with military troops and the impact of Iraqi bloggers. Oh yeah, and also a little bit about the life of a coconut trader.

Your Wikipedia entry says that the only time you weren’t a journalist in the last 60 years was when you were a coconut trader in Fiji.
I tell university students that if you can’t get a job, do anything that comes along because journalism is about life and it doesn’t matter what you do, its all handy material. So I was without a job, I couldn’t find one in newspapers and I saw a small advertisement saying ‘Coconut and copra traders wanted in Fiji.’

What was it like being a coconut trader?
It sounds romantic, but it wasn’t. I was in charge of a large group of native laborers and we went down to unload the home boat that would come in every six weeks with all the goods – nails, tins of butter, that sort of thing – it involved counting and it was in fact the most boring job I’ve ever had.

Coverage of the Iraq War has changed a lot since the war’s inception and media itself has changed a lot, too. How do you feel coverage of the war has been in the last year?
Not very well in my view because of the embedding of war correspondents. The nature of war has changed. Whereas it used to be industrial war, where you fought over enemy territory and the winner was the one who captured the most territory, now it’s become a war against an enemy’s entire way of life. And that has made the entire coverage different. It’s an information war rather than an industrial war. The army puts as much emphasis on its media strategy as it does on its military strategy.

Interview continues below the cut. It’s interesting, I promise.

How is the role of a reporter in the Iraq War different than a reporter in previous American wars?
He’s constrained. Embedding of the media in the military in wartime means he’s not free to go wherever he wants to go without incredible risk. He or she has to conform to military regulations and you can’t freely report the war. The results of what the media produces is very very very poor compared to what’s been done in previous wars.

Would you consider the effect of embedding reporters to be government censorship, then?
It’s more self-censorship than censorship. If you want to be able to go everywhere and see most things, then you have to conform to the military regulations. And if you don’t, you risk being killed because it’s now statistically safer to be in the army than to be a war correspondent.

Well what should reporters in Iraq do, then?
If you don’t have military protection, you hope that your media company insures you. So what can you do? You go and embed and hope that something happens that will make your name, make a good story and the military will let you publish it.

You reported during the 80s on the KGB in Russia. How did you report in that environment of propaganda and censorship?
My strategy for reporting what went on in the Soviet union and the secret world of the KGB and the CIA was to not believe anyone and to try to find my way through the fog of disinformation that surrounded the whole thing. And then make a stab at what might be the truth. And luckily, sometimes I was right.

Have the internet and blogs helped coverage of Iraq?
Well, the more sources you have, the better. That’s my complaint against embedding. You’re embedded but you’re also stuck. You have only one source of information, it’s better to have as many as you possibly can, but that’s very difficult. If people can blog and get to the internet, then the only problem is that you might have too much and drown in information.

Do you know any reporters in Iraq who read local Iraqi blogs or something like that?
Yes there are many people who do that. The Guardian ends up getting its best coverage of the war in Iraq from a local Iraqi blogger who contacted the Guardian and said this is my view of what’s going on. He did very well and ended up being a Guardian correspondent.

So in that case, not having credentials or any journalism training helped his reporting because he wasn’t part of the military-media machine.
It was helpful even to have nothing, he just looked out his window and reported what he saw. But he happened to be in the middle of everything that was going on.

Read the Baghdad Blogger’s old posts at the Guardian website and hear Philip Knightley debate the ethics of embedded journalism tonight! Lewis and Clark, 7PM, Templeton Center.